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January 03, 2007

GREATEST. BOOK. EVER.

We're tanned, we're rested, we're back from our holiday break.  Many, many thanks to those who wrote with wishes and congratulations. 

We're always vaguely concerned when we find ourselves nodding in agreement with Jonathan Yardley, worried that we've prematurely entered our Late Cranky Phase, but regular readers of TEV will know that one of our charming (or pretentious) traditions is to re-read The Great Gatsby every January.  So we find nothing to disagree with when Yardley avers that "If from all of our country's books I could have only one, "The Great Gatsby" would be it."

Gg It seems to me, though, that no American novel comes closer than "Gatsby" to surpassing literary artistry, and none tells us more about ourselves. In an extraordinarily compressed space -- the novel is barely 50,000 words long -- Fitzgerald gives us a meditation on some of this country's most central ideas, themes, yearnings and preoccupations: the quest for a new life, the preoccupation with class, the hunger for riches and "the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

Think about that people ... 50,000 words.  What's that, maybe fifteen Infinite Jests?  (Actually, IJ probably has longer footnotes ... )

We can't imagine there are many TEV readers who haven't read it, but just in case, it's online here.   There's also an interesting essay by noted Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli on "The publishing process and correction of factual errors with reference to The Great Gatsby."   And, finally, here's a New York Review of Books essay on Trimalchio, the early version of Gatsby which proves, as we've learned, that authors are often the worst possible people to title their books.

Posted at 12:30 AM in Worthy Titles |

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Comments

John

Infinite Jest made me feel far less alone in the world than the Great Gatsby.

Posted by: John | January 03, 2007 at 10:39 AM

Robert Taylor Brewer

On the opposite spectrum we have Jane Smiley weighing in with a total pan of Scott's masterpiece, opining words to the effect that Gatsby isn't the world wide source of wisdom we've imparted to it, Fitz's "aphoristic style" only makes it seem so. And the ending is completely senseless "And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

I don't know. Paul Simon got it. Even wrote a song about it. "The more you keep on..... the more you're slip slidin' away." If Rhymin' Simon can hack it why can't Jane?

Posted by: Robert Taylor Brewer | January 04, 2007 at 02:05 PM

Hadara

I'm writing on behalf of Public Radio International's Studio 360, a weekly radio program about creativity, pop culture, and the arts hosted by Kurt Andersen.

I think you might be interested in listening to this week’s episode, part of our American icon series, devoted entirely to The Great Gatsby, which you can find here: http://www.studio360.org/americanicons/episodes/2007/04/06

Enjoy!

Posted by: Hadara | April 06, 2007 at 02:50 PM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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